English as a second language (ESL) classrooms in the United States increasingly include students who have had exposure to more than one global context of English. Unless explicitly discussed, the variations within global Englishes can lead to confusion and obstruct learning. In addition, sometimes teachers fail to acknowledge the Englishes that their students bring into the classrooms as valid and valuable, and miss an opportunity to teach their students even more effectively. Teachers who are themselves familiar with global contexts of English can draw upon their own translingual practices and translinguistic identities to validate their students' Englishes while teaching the target variety and developing their students' translingual competence. Translingualism in TESOL is emerging as a new paradigm, and the advances that have been made in theorization about translingual practices need to be supplemented with translingual pedagogies. In response, this article presents a practitioner research report on teaching ESL in a community college from a translingual perspective, and offers snapshots of classroom discussions around variations in postcolonial Englishes. The author emphasizes the need for teachers to acknowledge and validate the Englishes and translinguistic identities present in their classrooms, and shares implications for ESL practitioners' professional development, teacher education programs, as well as practitioner research.

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College programs in English for academic purposes (EAP) continue to use deficit “native/nonnative” labels despite a well established academic discourse (Yazan & Rudolph, 2018) that successfully critiques these constructs as being counter to the values of equity, diversity, and inclusion espoused by most higher education institutions. There is a need, therefore, to create spaces within EAP classrooms for students to problematize these constructs, and to provide them with alternative more equitable identity options, as exemplified in the research presented here. The practitioner‐research study focuses on how an EAP instructor fostered critical dialogues in the classroom around “native‐nonnative” identities by drawing upon her own translingual‐identity‐as‐pedagogy. Applying a pluralistic practitioner‐research design and integrating appropriate ethical research generation and collection methods (Jain, 2013, 2014), the researcher coded classroom data using adapted grounded theory and then employed critical and sociocultural lenses to interpret the data. The analyses revealed that by fostering critical dialogue and drawing upon her own translingual identity in her pedagogy (Jain et al., 2021a), the author was able to create opportunities for students to deconstruct the prescriptive “native/nonnative” labels and move beyond their initial over‐simplistic assumptions to a more nuanced understanding of the constructs.

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